


I'll Keep You Close

by kaeorin



Series: Loki's Lullabies [171]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Affection, Avenger Loki (Marvel), Comfort, Cuddling & Snuggling, Dreams, F/M, Fluff, Good Loki (Marvel), Literal Sleeping Together, Loki (Marvel) Feels, M/M, Nightmares, Nighttime, POV Loki (Marvel), Protective Loki (Marvel), Reader-Insert, Sharing a Bed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-25
Updated: 2021-01-25
Packaged: 2021-03-17 08:08:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,004
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28971120
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaeorin/pseuds/kaeorin
Summary: While Loki lies awake in your bed thinking about the miracle that is you, something else entirely is flickering through your mind.
Relationships: Loki (Marvel)/Reader
Series: Loki's Lullabies [171]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1678240
Comments: 12
Kudos: 175





	I'll Keep You Close

**Author's Note:**

> I had a dream like the reader's sometime last week and it inspired this fic. It’s primarily yet another soft and warm Loki-thinking-about-you-while-in-bed-with-you story; hope that’s okay!

Over the past few months, he’d spent a rather substantial amount of time watching you sleep.

He told himself that it wasn’t creepy. It certainly wasn’t _his_ fault that his body required so much less sleep than yours. What was the problem, then, if he joined you here in your bedroom while you slept instead of sitting by himself elsewhere in the small apartment? He liked lying down with you at the end of the day and holding you while you fought sleep so you could keep talking to him. He liked caressing your cheeks, your shoulder, your back, and scolding you about how late it was and how dearly you needed your rest. And when you did finally relent and you closed your eyes to allow yourself to drift off to sleep there in his arms, well, it was the sweetest drug.

And Loki was not typically one to deny himself pleasures such as that.

In your waking hours, you were competent and able and strong, of course, but, at the same time, so soft and starved for touch. Initially, that had taken some getting used to. You loved touching him. You would smooth your warm hands all along his body or fit yourself along him and hold him tightly. An existence as long and as storied as his, and it took a mortal to show him how deeply he longed for a gentle touch. When he finally came to accept the way you craved him, that was it. For both of you. You were his to touch, and _oh_ , he would touch you. Sometimes it felt as though he couldn’t bear to take his hands off of you. And you delighted in it.

Tonight, you were wound around him as you often were, with your legs tangled with his and your arm flung haphazardly—but securely—around his belly. Your head was on his shoulder, right where it belonged, perfectly-positioned so that he could feel each sweet exhale on his chest and turn just slightly to kiss the top of your head, to breathe in the smell of your hair. Never in his life had he allowed himself to entertain the idea of having something like this with anyone. He tightened his arms around you, but not too much, not enough to wake you, and let out a long, contented sigh against the top of your head.

At this point, he had to have spent hours, days, lifetimes going over the wonders of your sleeping form. Even after all this time, it was still so easy for him to get swept away in the sight of you. He’d composed a thousand poems about the way your body felt as you slowly fell asleep, and, some of them, he’d recited to you there in the darkness, while your breaths came short and soft and sweet in the night. But still, there was something about the way your body felt against him that put even the most revered poets of Asgard to shame.

He readjusted the blanket, then, pulling it more securely up and over your shoulder. He was comfortable enough there in the cool night air, but you tended to burrow, to nestle down among your many layers of covers. You made him want to protect you. If he could tuck you safely away somewhere, shielded from the cruelties of your mortal world, he’d do it in a heartbeat. Far too often lately, he’d been forced to watch your face go tense as you listened to some news story or another, or else he had to watch your eyes fill at once with woe and fire as you told him about something you’d seen or heard in the streets. If he were his old self, that jealous, selfish boy, he would most assuredly have locked you away somewhere, perhaps in some other realm to ensure that he was the only one who could lay eyes or hands upon you. But that also made him wonder: if he were that same boy, would he have had room in that bitter heart to feel as strongly about you as he did now?

These were the thoughts that troubled him in the middle of the night. There was so much in his past that he had yet to atone for. And you, you precious thing, you weren’t much help. Each time he gathered the courage to tell you some new foul story from his past, you listened with a solemn expression on your face even as your eyes peered deep inside him. Without fail, every time he finished his story, you found some way to sympathize with him. You would tilt your head and coo at him, sometimes, or else you’d say his name in that low voice, that voice so full of emotion. He wanted to be frustrated with you, or else with the way that you never looked at him with horror in your lovely eyes, but it was so much easier to melt against you, to melt into the warmth of your love for him.

So he did.

And each time he did, you put your arms around him and whispered his name against his lips and made him feel like accepting you was the easiest thing in the world.

In your sleep, you whined and rubbed your cheek against him. Loki froze, attuning his every sense to you. Were you waking? Were you dreaming? Neither of you was a stranger to nightmares. Admittedly, he tended to have more than you did. But each time he clawed his way back up to wakefulness, you were there, ready to touch him if he could allow it, or else speak to him so sweetly if he couldn’t. He was haunted by ten thousand heinous things, and they all came to play in the night. He pushed the thought away and smoothed his hand along your back in hopes of soothing you into a more peaceful sleep.

Sleeping with you should have been enough to drive away his nightmares, he thought. Early on, he did his best to hide them, or else to lie about them when he inevitably woke you up. Before he finally accepted the permanence of your love, he’d worried that you would tire of his fears, or else that you’d be hurt by them. But now he was in a place where he could seek you out upon waking, even if he had not disturbed you, and pulling you ever-so-slightly closer to him was enough to take his mind off of the dreams. You did not tire of him. It seemed that you _would not_ tire of him. Your devotion knew no bounds, not even in the depth of the night, when you’d been dragged out of a restful sleep. 

You made him want to be better. He wanted to be worthy of your love. He wanted to deserve it. But, even more than that, he wanted to give it back to you. You didn’t love him like this because you hoped for anything in return, he knew—you loved him like this because it simply wasn’t in you _not_ to. He wasn’t aware of the changes, at least not at first, but already he was so different from the man he used to be. It wasn’t your job to fix him. He knew better than to rely on you to set his mind straight and make him heal from the past, but you provided so much support simply by virtue of your existence. Your touch. Your gentle attention.

And, even now, you got so flustered when he told you as much. Some part of him loved the way you would roll your eyes, playful at first, and try to crack a joke any time his compliments or gratitude grew just a little too earnest. It had never occurred to you to be appreciated for the things you did. Sometimes your hands would flutter nervously in front of you like birds trying to decide whether to flee, and that only ever made him want to slide his fingers between yours, to cradle them gently within his own. He relished the heat that rose into your cheeks, the way you’d try to draw your brows together to fix him with a stern look that only ever made you look all the more precious to him.

You whimpered, a little louder this time, and then mumbled something that even Loki could not quite understand. But he understood _enough_. He shook you gently and murmured your name in a low voice. Often, your nightmares would pass on their own, usually to be forgotten by morning, but he couldn’t bear the thought of letting you suffer this tonight.

He knew when you awoke. You drew in a ragged breath but then tightened your arm around him and sighed. 

“Thank you.” Even at this late hour, you voice was sweet. Musical. You held him like you’d never let him go and turned your head to hide your face against his throat. He let you, for a while. You were not trembling. Whatever you’d been dreaming about, it didn’t appear to continue to plague you now that you were awake. But he could feel the way you were breathing him in, the way you had your fingers spread wide against him. It felt like relief. 

“What was it, love? What were you dreaming?”

At first, you only laughed. “It’s nothing. It’s stupid.” You readjusted, apparently re-positioning yourself in preparation for falling back asleep. He might have let it go. You so rarely forced him to tell you anything he didn’t want to tell that it seemed unthinkable for him to do otherwise for you. But he held his tongue nonetheless, hoping that perhaps the extended silence would draw out the story—or else allow you to go back to sleep. After a while, you groaned and shook your head. “Really. I just had a dream where you were telling me you didn’t love me anymore.”

“What?!” It was, quite possibly, the very last thing that he would have expected. He held you tighter—as tightly as he could, in fact, without crushing you. If the sounds that left your mouth were any indication, you appreciated his grasp.

“I know it was just a dream. I’m not mad at you for what my brain came up with. It just...felt really real. In my dream, you said that I didn’t make you feel good. That I _couldn’t_ make you feel good, and that you were tired of settling when there was so much else out there. But...waking up in your arms helped a lot. Thank you.”

He was lost for words. Even that was not so uncommon lately, since he’d come here to stay with you. He shifted only enough so that he could press his lips to your forehead and kiss you repeatedly. As you’d said, of course the version of him that you’d dreamed about was not actually him, but rather a character conjured up by your unconscious, but he still didn’t like that you brain could just give anyone his face and make them say those kinds of things to you. How odd that he could spend the night lost in thoughts of tender love and you could be tormented so.

Already your breathing was beginning to change again. You were drifting off to sleep, secure in his arms despite the way your brain could apparently question that. Now was probably not the best time to regale you with ardent proclamations of how much you’d changed his life with your heart and your hands. He loosened his grip a little, only so that it wasn’t quite so crushing, and kissed your forehead yet again.

And then he drew in a long, slow breath and spoke to you in a murmur, composing poetry about the warmth of your body and the sweetness of your breath and the way he never, _never_ wanted to let you go.


End file.
